


Beholder

by Sorrel



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Oral Sex, capital-H history, more like friends to friends with benefits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:00:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25038883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: There she was: Xander Harris, in the horrifyingly present flesh.  A little taller, a lot tanner.  Down an eye.  Smelling like smog and desert winds instead of high school and hormones, but still giving him the exact same look, the one that said she'd seen the best he had to offer, and just wasn't all that impressed.Rule 63 AU of AtS 5x11, "Damage."  When the calls goes out for aid with a rogue Slayer, the Council sends their closest representative.  Their closest representative probably would have liked to know about the latest miraculous resurrection sometimebeforeshe walked into the lion's den.  Wesley would have liked a bit of warning before awkward personal drama started playing out in front of half the bloody company.  Angel would have liked to handle things himself, and Spike, well.  Spike probably would have liked not to lose his fucking hands.
Relationships: Xander Harris/Spike
Comments: 7
Kudos: 47





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**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU-ized take on the Angel episode "Damage," and so content warnings concomitant with that episode, i.e., beatings, forced sedation, dismemberment, and references to past sexual abuse of a non-POV character as well as past assaults committed by a POV character. It's a relatively small section of the story, but if you want to skip the scene it starts with "There were moments, Spike was learning," and the next one starts with "Yeah, Andrew." If anyone hasn't seen the episode and needs a more specific description of the content let me know and I'd be happy to provide.

It wasn't uncommon to find strangers loitering in the lobby, looking for Angel. Despite not-inconsiderable efforts to the contrary, he'd still become something of a public figure after his ascension to executive leadership. There had already been a handful of incidents where his nocturnal adventuring resulted in a grateful young damsel going home, doing a bit of online research, and showing up the next day to express said gratitude. Usually in clothing that seemed insufficient even by California standards.

In theory, it was Harmony's job to gently but firmly tell them to shove off. In reality, after the first two times it devolved into what could be politely termed a 'diplomatic incident,' it was decided by all involved that someone _else_ should be responsible. Lorne, if possible, as the most tactful of the executive team, and if not, then either Gunn or Wesley, as the ones with offices directly off the main stair and thus usually quick to arrive when summoned. Practically speaking, usually Wesley, as he actually _used_ said office and Gunn usually only breezed through long enough to switch out his briefcase and pick up his golf clubs.

_He's going to owe me for this,_ Wesley told himself, approaching the lanky girl being slowly digested into one of the overstuffed visitor chairs. _Double, if she proves to be a crier._

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting," he said briskly, sneaking a glance at his watch. Angel would be on his way back into the office shortly, and Wesley wanted this girl handled before he made it back. "A meeting ran over. I hope you haven't been here long."

"No worries, I was people-watching." She turned to smile up at him, and he realized with a start that what he'd taken for a shadow was actually a patch over her left eye. "I'm running at fifty percent these days, so it takes a while and holy _god_ you're Wesley."

It wouldn't be the first time someone had presumed on an invented relationship - usually to better make their way to Angel - but it was the first time it had been done with such appalled hilarity. Wrongfooted in a way he rarely was anymore, Wesley said stiffly, "You have me at a disadvantage, I'm afraid."

"Wow, way to crush the ol' ego." The girl - no, young woman, she was older than the faded UCSD sweatshirt had led him to assume - shook her head with a snort and clambered out of the carnivorous lounge chair with deceptive ease. "All those months spent glaring at you over the library table and I don't even ring a _bell_? Ouch, man. I gotta tell you, I think I'm hurt."

"The library tab… good lord." Wesley stared back at her, struck by the distinct feeling of seeing a ghost. (Which would have been considerably less disconcerting than this, given all of his experiences with actual ghosts.) "Miss _Harris?_ "

"The only and only. Well, not so much, actually, considering the number of unmarried cousins. You really should just bite the bullet and call me Xander."

He'd forgotten her infectious grin - likely, he thought, because he'd never seen it aimed in his direction. "Xander, of course." Feeling vaguely at sea, he offered his hand in automatic courtesy. "It's very good to see you again."

"Likewise." She took the hand and drew him easily into a loose embrace before he could protest, slapping his back twice before setting him free once more. "How the hell are you? It's been, jeez, what. Four years?"

"Give or take." He couldn't stop staring. She'd filled out considerably in the intervening years, growing into both the long limbs and absurd cheekbones that had once caused Cordelia to compare her rather uncharitably to an underfed giraffe. Between that and the eye, he didn't know that he would have given her so much as a second glance if he passed her on the street, but it was undeniably her. "You're looking, ah. Well."

"You too, man. Willow mentioned you'd lost the stuck up your ass, but I wasn't expecting, y'know." She waved vaguely up and down his frame. " _This._ L.A. obviously agrees with you."

How even to respond? "Historical precedent would beg to differ," he said, with an appropriately rueful smile, and swiftly changed the subject. "What brings you to the city?"

She gave him a strange look he couldn't quite decipher until she said, "You? I mean, you _did_ call Giles about a Slayer on the loose, right? That wasn't a hoax?"

_Oh, bloody hell._ "You're with the Council," he said, cursing himself for a fool not to have picked it up immediately. "I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting you."

Some of the warmth leached away from her smile. "No worries," she said, with a shrug that was just a shade too casual to be real. "I probably don't seem like your idea of a Watcher."

No, as a matter of fact, she looked like a bloody college student, but that wasn't what he'd meant. _Can't go two bloody minutes without putting your foot in it, can you, Pryce?_ "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to say _you,_ that is, I only meant, ah, I wasn't expecting someone so quickly." He tried out the awkward half-smile that always seemed to get Angel out of trouble. "I only placed the call to Mr. Giles a few hours ago."

"Oh." Xander scrubbed a hand through her short hair and gave him a rueful look. "That makes sense. Sorry, my brain's still like six time zones back, I think."

_Get it together, you berk._ "I'm familiar with the problem."

"Yeah, I bet." And clearly Xander had learned a thing or two about forgiveness since high school because she let it drop with a shrug and changed the subject. "Anyway, I was on a purchase run in San Diego when Giles got the call, so I was the closest backup available. Not that I'm much in the way of backup-" Here she flashed him a wry, self-deprecating grin. "-but it's gotta be better than nothing."

"I daresay there's few better equipped to assist with a matter such as this," Wesley assured her, relieved to be on stable conversational ground once more. "I'll get us a conference room - is there anything in particular we can provide?"

"Nope." She lifted a battered knapsack that had been resting at her feet. "Have laptop, will travel."

"Good lord, don't tell me the Council's finally entering the modern age?"

"Kicking and screaming." She kept pace with him easily when he led her down the hall towards the conference room, the heels of her battered boots barely audible through the thick carpeting. "And, okay, I'm woman enough to admit that I was in the can-can line when Dawn first laid down the law, but that was before I realized I saw its true potential."

"Unlimited knowledge at your fingertips?"

"Unlimited movies on demand." She grinned at him. "I spend a lot of time on layovers."

His own lips twitched in answer. "So you've seen the light."

"Seen it and singing hallelujah. These days my life is one long string of airports - anything that makes them bearable is a definite plus in my book."

"It sounds as if the Council has kept you busy."

"Ohhh yeah. Giles keeps saying that it's not as bad as starting from scratch, but it certainly feels that way when I'm on my third continent in as many days. Man, I did _not_ know what I was getting myself into with this gig. No booth for 'professional sidekick' on careers day, you know?"

"Not even in Sunnydale?"

"Right? Talk about your missed opportunities."

He chuckled and drew to a halt before an open door. "I suppose both of us are a long way from where we started."

"Uh, some of us more than others," she said, gaping around the conference room. "Jeez, and I thought the Council house in Rome was swank city."

"We do our poor best," Wesley said, manfully suppressing a smirk.

"Poor is _not_ the word." Xander wandered in and slung her knapsack down into one of the chairs. "You sure it's okay to be in here? I feel like I'm going to get scuff marks on the table or something."

"This is the executive boardroom, reserved for senior staff."

She looked at him.

"Angel, myself, and the other department heads," he clarified. "Which is to say - yes, this is exactly where we should be."

Xander eyed the glossy table with some distrust, then shrugged. "If you say so." She took a seat - in Angel's usual spot at the head, and why did he think that was on purpose? - and leaned back, folding her hands over her stomach. "Where is Angel, anyway?"

"Still in the field, though he should be on his way in shortly. Coffee?"

"Only every day of my life." She pushed up on her toes, balancing her chair back on two legs as she peered around the room. "I thought Angel was mostly desk-jockeying it up these days. Pen is mightier, and all that."

"He keeps his hand in now and then," Wesley said mildly. "His position allows him greater latitude for helping those in need, but there are some problems that are best solved the old fashioned way."

"Fist to face," Xander nodded. "I'm vaguely familiar with the concept."

"Quite. He was on his way to intercept Dana, but someone else got there first."

"Shit, is she alright?"

This time his smirk was considerably harder to suppress. "She's fine. Apparently her Slayer instincts are more than adequate, even without any training. If Angel's report is to be believed, she managed to escape shortly after throwing Spike out of a window-"

Xander's chair went over backwards with a crash.

###### 

"A psychotic vampire slayer."

"How many times are you gonna keep saying that?"

"Just tryin' to wrap my lobes around it. A psycho slayer. That's a turn up for the books."

Not for the first time, Angel wondered why the hell he'd let Spike follow him back to Wolfram and Hart. Some misguided effort to keep him out of trouble? As if _that_ had ever worked. Besides…

"You were the one who let her get away."

"At least I was trying to stop her!"

And what was Angel, chopped fucking liver? "Oh, how'd that work out?"

Spike sniffed. "At least I know the game now, don't I? I killed two slayers with my own hands. Think I can handle one that's gone daft in the melon."

Oh, no. He stopped short, forcing Spike to follow suit or avoid walking into him. "You're not handling anything, Spike, okay? Wes already contacted the Council. They're sending their top agent to retrieve her."

"Who's that, soddin' _Andrew?_ Dunno if you noticed, Peaches, but six months ago the Council was down to the Scoobies and a houseful of teenagers. Not exactly bleedin' _Bond_ over there."

Wesley stuck his head out of the door before Angel could answer. "Gentlemen," he said, in that extremely dry way of his that made it very clear that he was calling them something else entirely in his head, "perhaps you would like to join us, instead of arguing in the hall?"

Spike, ever the equal-opportunity bickerer, immediately switched his attention to Wes. "What about you, Percy? You used to be one of 'em, back in the bad old days. You think they're going to be any use?"

"Well, ah, the thing is-"

"It's none of your _business._ " Jesus Christ, how many times did Angel have to say it? "We've got it handled. Go crawl back in the bottle. It's what you do after a breakup, isn't it?"

"And what would you sodding know about it? All you ever do is bugger off. You left the Slayer, _for_ her own good, you left us in China without so much as a by-your-leave, you couldn't even stay in _hell_ properly-"

"Spike-" Wesley tried.

"Look who's talking! You got spit out of an amulet - _my_ amulet - like some kind of demented jack in the box and you think you're the freaking expert-"

"Ah, Angel-"

"At least I died saving the bloody world, instead of tryin' to end it like _some_ I could name-"

"Yeah, real fucking impressive, come back and try me after you've done it another dozen times-"

"Will you two both _shut up!_ " Wesley's voice snapped between them like a cracking whip, leaving only silence in its wake. "As I was _trying_ to say," he continued, glaring impartially at them both, "perhaps you should confine your bickering to another topic, as the Council representative is already _here_."

"Hey, don't stop on my account. I was kinda enjoying the show."

Angel closed his eyes. He knew that voice. Four years was not long enough to forget. Four _centuries_ might not be long enough, but damned if he hadn't been planning on making the effort.

Wesley stepped aside, and there she was: Xander Harris, in the horrifyingly present flesh. A little taller, a lot tanner. Down an eye. Smelling like smog and desert winds instead of high school and hormones, but still giving him the exact same look, the one that said she'd seen the best he had to offer, and just wasn't all that impressed.

Angel looked at Wesley. "You couldn't have warned me?"

How Wes managed to pack that much sarcasm into a single look, Angel would never understand. "I _tried._ You and Spike were quite determined not to let me get a word in edgewise."

"Yeah, they do that." Xander nodded politely enough at Angel, though he could tell he wasn't the one that had her attention. "Deadboy."

He had to fight not to grit his teeth. "Harris."

"And Deadboy, Junior." Spike was uncharacteristically silent, not rising to the bait, and one dark eyebrow climbed Xander's forehead. "Hey. Fangless. You just came back from the dead. The least you can do is say 'hi.'"

"Hullo, pet." No sarcastic comment, no patented William the Bloody bluster and bullshit, just a low mumble of greeting. "See you made it out of the pit intact."

"No thanks to you and your roman candle impersonation. Did you have to take the whole town down with you? I had some valuable keepsakes in there."

Now Angel was the one with raised eyebrows, but Spike only scowled at her half-heartedly, his head tilted in a haphazard version of his usual mocking sneer. "Your little geek plates aren't valuable to anyone but you, you sodding anorak."

Was that lip twitch a scowl, or a smile? "I'm just saying, they don't let you redeem Powerball tickets in _hell_."

"Yeah," Spike said, and shoved his hands in his pockets. "You're bloody welcome, brat."

"Then I guess that means I should say 'thanks.' Asshole."

They frowned at each other for a moment, a sizzling kind of mock-temper chicken that Xander promptly lost a second later when she cracked a half-laughing smile, glancing skyward like she couldn't believe this was her life. Angel was very familiar with that kind of look.

"Jesus, Spike, you should've seen my face when Wes said you were back. Gotta hand it to you guys, you really got me. I'm gonna have to give Giles a whole _ration_ of shit - you just know he was trying to get me back for that thing in Mumbai, letting me walk in here cold."

_She doesn't know,_ Angel realized. _Wes didn't tell her. She just thinks she's out of the loop, not…_

Wes's thoughts were obviously running along the same track, judging by the awkward clear of his throat. "Ah, perhaps we should discuss this inside…"

But it was too late. "Wasn't Rupert's fault, luv." Spike rocked back on his heels, then straightened. Always brave at the exact wrong moment, that was Spike. "I've only been back, proper back, for a few weeks yet. Hadn't really got the word out yet."

" _Weeks_?" Xander laughed. "Oh come on, even by Hellmouth standards that's lame. You don't just _come back from the dead_ and neglect to tell any of your old..."

Spike looked at her, his jaw tight, and said nothing.

"You did," Xander breathed. Her gaze swept to Angel and then, unfairly, Wesley, before it landed back on Spike. "Holy shit, you actually did, you asshole. You didn't tell _anyone_?"

Even Angel could hear the hysteria brewing in the last three syllables. Spike winced. "Listen, pet-"

"Oh, do not even _start_ with that crap." Her hand snapped up between them, as if she could ward off his excuses by force. "You know, when I found out you came back, I didn't even question it. About time that shithole gave back, you know? And now I find out that this whole time, you…"

"It wasn't the _whole_ -"

"Jesus Christ, you didn't even tell _Buffy?_ "

"I had my reasons!"

"Oh, I bet you fucking did." Xander folded her arms over her chest. "Alright then, let's hear it. Let's hear what passed for a decision-making process in that squirrel's nest you call a brain. I bet this should be real fucking good."

Wes eyed the crowd of onlookers that was starting to gather. "Ah, perhaps we should-"

Angel shushed him absently. It wasn't his dignity on the line, for a change, and he wasn't going to miss this for love or money.

"Look, just 'cause _you_ don't like it doesn't make me wrong," Spike said, starting to sound a little pissed himself. "You don't know sod-all about how it's been, these past few months-"

"Because you didn't _tell_ us-"

"Because it wasn't any of your business!"

"It wasn't any of our-" Xander had to pause to take a breath, her hands fluttering with inarticulate rage. "You _died,_ you prick!"

"I know! I was sodding there!"

"You don't know _shit._ Do you even know how many people we lost down there? The first couple weeks in Cleveland were like a nonstop wake, and you, _you_ -"

"I what, ducks?" Spike rocked up onto his toes, getting right up in her face. With a start, Angel realized that they were almost exactly the same height. "You going to tell me I was missed, huh? Lots of nostalgic stories around the campfire about ol' Spike and his wacky hijinks? Pull the other one, it's got bells on. We all knew where we sodding stood, and it wasn't exactly shoulder to bloody shoulder, was it?"

"Don't you dare try to pull that 'woe is me' crap, not after everything we've-"

"You lot always seem to forget, luv." His smile took on a familiar nasty edge. "I'm not one of your sodding Scoobies. I'm not part of the 'team.' I was there for the Slayer - even when the rest of you lot tossed her into the cold, like last week's garbage."

"I wasn't part of that-"

"Didn't stop it either, did you? Had your replacement all lined up, not a care for your friend, the one who saved you time and again-"

"Not a care for- for fuck's sake, Spike, I'd just lost my _eye!_ You should remember, you were there!"

"And that makes it okay to stab her in the-"

"I wasn't stabbing any-"

"Only 'cause you were too _useless_ to do more than sit there and-"

" _Stop_."

For such a quiet man, Wesley could sink a lot of steel into a single syllable, Angel reflected. Both Spike and Xander fell silent, but neither of them looked away, blue eyes locked on brown with a kind of focused intensity that was honestly a little uncomfortable to watch.

"This isn't productive," Wesley continued, more gently now. "Xander, I know you've had a very great shock, but you did come to us for a reason, remember? We all want to bring Dana in without any further injury-"

"Some of us more than others," Angel muttered.

"-so we should be working together."

"Oh, so _that's_ what this is about." Spike gave a short, ugly laugh, a familiar sneer curling his mouth. "Slayer's got you doing her dirty work, is that it? How times _haven't_ changed."

"Spike, if you can't add something useful-"

"You think she's here out of the goodness of her heart?" Spike swept a burning glance at Angel and Wesley, then to the little crowd of onlookers that wasn't even pretending not to be listening anymore. "You think she's here to _help?_ Dream on, Percy. You know what the Council thinks about the likes of you. She's probably just here to learn everything you know and then she'll be off to handle it herself. Isn't that right, ducks?"

"You know, I don't remember inviting you to this meeting," Angel said, before she could answer. "In fact, I don't remember inviting you to anything, anywhere."

"'s alright," Spike said. "Work better on my own, anyway. You lot have your…" Another contemptuous glance. "...meeting, and I'll go out there and do the real work. 's what I'm used to, anyway."

Spike turned away in a swirl of black leather that Angel knew for a fact had to be practiced and strode to the door. About to follow, Angel found himself stopped by a hand on his sleeve.

"Just let him go." Xander's hand dropped away before he could shake it off, her gaze still fixed on Spike's retreating back. "Trust me, if you chase after him I guarantee he has at least a half-dozen comebacks already stored up."

That sounded like the voice of experience, and it wasn't like he didn't know she was right, but- Damn it, he _hated_ letting Spike get the last word. "And you're fine with letting him go after a Slayer alone?"

"Not like he's going to kill her. If Kennedy couldn't inspire homicide, no one will." Xander stole one last look as the doors closed on Spike's scowling face, and then turned away with a resolute snap of her head and offered up a rueful smile to Wes. "Listen, I'm sorry about, uh, us. I wasn't expecting… Well, sorry."

"It's quite alright," Wes said, the quiet warmth of his words mirrored in his reassuring smile. Well, at least _someone_ was getting along, here. "It's entirely understandable. As I said, it's a very great shock, and I know quite well how difficult Spike can be when he's in a mood."

Wes didn't know the first fucking thing about how _difficult_ Spike could be, and it didn't have a single goddamn thing to do with his _mood_. The problem with Spike wasn't his recklessness, or his temper, or any one of his thousand and one incredibly irritating habits. No, it was the place where his fuck-the-world rage ran headlong into his innate and unshakable loyalty, and ground up anything caught in the middle.

Angel wondered what Xander had gotten caught in the gears.

Whatever it was, she didn't let it show on her face, returning Wesley's smile with an easy grin that almost managed to look sincere. "It's enough to make you wonder if vamps get PMS," she agreed. "But enough about Captain Peroxide. I'm here for a Slayer, and now that the gang's all here-" She spared a brief, sardonic glance in Angel's direction. "-it's probably about time we get this show on the road."

###### 

Spike had been at this gig a long time, in one form or another. He'd survived hunters, Slayers, and all manner of beasties, kept himself and his girl safe through two world wars, angry mobs, an apocalypse or two. He had good instincts, Spike did. Didn't always bloody listen to them, but he kept them in fine working order. Had to, to have made it this far.

Which meant that he bloody well knew when someone was following him.

"I know you're here," he said, not bothering to raise his voice. "Might as well come out."

"Depends," Xander said, from the other side of the fence. "You going to bite my head off again?"

His lips twitched. "B'lieve you bit first, pet," he muttered, then sighed. "Don't much feel like fighting. Come, now."

"You bit harder," she said back, but there was a rustle of bushes as she moved towards the gate.

"'m a vampire, ducks, what do you expect?"

"Maybe _not_ to torpedo my mission out of sheer spite and go prancing off into the sunset?"

"First of all, I have never pranced anywhere in my soddin' life. An' second of all-"

She emerged in front of him and he fell silent, letting himself stare in the way he hadn't dared back in the hallway, with Angel and his flunkies watching every word. She looked good, Xander did. All tall and tan and healthy - she'd filled out again, put back on the weight that stress and pain had sucked away those last few months, and had finally gotten some bloody sun, by the looks of it. You almost couldn't see the scars on her cheek anymore, and the patch was all faded and dusty, showing the living she'd put into the intervening months.

Living. Christ, she really was alive. He hadn't doubted it, exactly - Percy, at least, was the 'rip the plaster off' type when it came to hard truths - but it had seemed almost too fantastic to believe that _anyone_ could make it out of that shithole. The Slayer, sure, but her mates? Human Xander, who he knew all-too-well was just as breakable as the rest of 'em? Impossible. He remembered the searing, all-consuming flame that had taken him - surely nothing could survive that.

"Second of all?"

Right, he'd been saying something. "Second of all, I was bloody _right_ , wasn't I? Or you wouldn't be out here playin' detective all on your lonesome."

She took a quick, ironic glance around the street. "Am I talking to myself? I mean, just because you don't have anything useful to add-"

"Ha bloody ha." He hated that smug wiggle of her eyebrows. Looked like two caterpillars trying to do a mating dance. "What I meant was, where's Batvamp and his trusty sidekicks?"

"I'm doing what's known in the biz as 'following a lead.'" She'd been biting her nails again, he noticed from her quick, ironic air quotes. How many failed attempts to quit did that make? Seven? Eight? "I figured that you wouldn't give up a chance to stand around playing 'who's bigger' with Angel unless you actually had something."

Sod it, he should have known she was up to something when she didn't chase him down earlier. Harris wasn't the type to let go of a fight half-done. "So you ditched Angel and the groupies, is that it?"

"Like yesterday's prom dress."

He shook his head, somewhere between irritated and admiring. "Real nice."

"Like you said, I'm not here to play nice with Angel. I'm here to find a Slayer." She made a little shooing gesture at him. "So go. Seek. Find."

"If you tell me to bloody fetch, I'm punting you back to the Council with my boot up your arse." He scowled at her, fighting his mouth's traitorous urge to turn up at the corners. "And what, pray tell, are you plannin' to do when I find her for you, then?"

Slowly, she tilted her head and - oh _sod_ her - tucked her tongue behind her teeth in flawless mimicry. "I'm planning on hiding behind a big, strong vamp and letting him take care of her. Don't suppose you've seen one?"

"I should've killed you when I had the chance," he told her sincerely.

"That would've been, what, 1998?" She dropped the mocking expression and started walking, forcing him to either follow or argue with her back. "Face it, pal. You're stuck with me."

"Like the sodding plague." He put on a little burst of speed to pass her - who was following sodding who here? - and glared at her over his shoulder. "Why couldn't Rupert have sent the witch? At least Red would be marginally more useful than a plastic sack if the lady of the hour does show her face."

"Excuse you, buddy. I'll have you know I've worked dozens, _dozens_ of cases like this, and-" Her reflexes had improved somewhat over the years, but she wasn't quite fast enough to avoid running into Spike's back when he suddenly stopped. "The hell?"

He called the demon with a shiver of violence, turning his face away from the wind. "I smell something."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her nose wrinkle with disgust. "Yeah, so do I. Dead fish, bilge water, garbage-"

"Blood," he corrected, and turned, shaking away the demon before she could comment. "Fresh."

"Man I forgot how gross that was," she said, but she was right there on his heels. "Is it-"

"Human," he grunted, looking over the body. "Not hers, but her kill."

"Shit," Xander said succinctly. "Poor bastard. She probably saw him as a threat."

"Whole world's a threat, when you're that deep in it." The throat was open and gaping, dead eyes staring sightlessly to the sky. Spike felt a pang of something down in the bottom of his chest and ruthlessly suppressed it. "C'mon, luv, let's go. You don't want to-"

Xander was already crouching next to the body and waving him out of her light.

"-look," he sighed, and stepped aside. "You know, time was you'd've jumped and screamed like a little girl."

"Well, I once watched you beat a demon to death with his buddy's thigh bone, but if it makes you feel better…" Her voice spiraled up into a mocking falsetto. "'Ooh! A body! How scary!'"

He growled at her. "Brat."

"Also there were those two years in the night shift at the Sunnydale morgue," she said, sounding normal again. "Grisly murder just doesn't hold the same wiggins, y'know?"

Well, when she put it that way. "When was that, anyway? Don't remember a tussle like that."

"I'm not surprised, you were _really_ drunk. Hey, can I borrow your lighter?"

"Shouldn't a proper Bond carry a bloody torch?" he said, but he was already digging it out of his pocket. "Seriously, when was this?"

"Uhhh… July, maybe? Yeah, right around the Fourth - I remember 'cause you killed the first one by shoving a bottle rocket up its-"

"Ohhh, _that_ demon." Spike tucked his thumbs into his belt and leaned back against the wall, thinking vaguely how much he'd like a smoke right about now. He'd need his nose in a minute, but still. "Good times."

"For some, maybe. I had demon goo in my hair for days. Even turpentine didn't get that stuff out."

"Nah, what you need for that shite is salt. Natural anticoagulant for them, breaks it right up."

She gave him a sideways look. "I'll keep that in mind, Martha Stewart."

He couldn't think of a good comeback for that, so he just changed the subject. "What are you even looking for, anyway? The girl did it, I can smell her all over him."

"Do I give you torture tips? No. Shut up and let me do my job." She flicked the lighter and brought the flame close to the torn-open throat. "For example: this wasn't made by a knife. Too jagged."

"What are you, Nancy sodding Drew?" He wished he hadn't given over the lighter. He needed something to do with his hands. "She had some kind of saw or somethin', last time we tangled."

"That'd do it." She took another look, bringing the lighter along the length of the body in one long sweep, and then gave a grunt and clicked it off. "Thanks."

He caught it on her lopsided underhanded toss - couldn't aim worth shite _before_ she lost the eye - and shoved it back in his pocket. "You need to break out the magnifying glass, too, or can I get back to tracking this bint?"

"With what, your keen nose for psychosis?"

He gestured at the corpse. "Blood pool a mile wide, mate - she's tracking it all over the place. Doesn't take a bloodhound."

She straightened. "Wait, so what was your plan _before_ we found the body?"

"'m a vampire, ducks," he said, for the second time that evening. "She's a Slayer. I already tangled with her once, and now I'm back on her territory. Figured she'd come to me."

"You're using yourself as bait," Xander summarized.

"More or less."

"I don't know why I expected anything different," she sighed. "You and planning were never really best buds."

"Never heard you complaining when I was saving your arse," Spike lied. "So can I get to it or what? Trail's goin' cold as we speak."

"Oh, by all means." She gestured politely towards the stinking alley beyond. "After you."

He growled low in his throat and stalked past her. "And try to keep your trap shut, or I won't hear her coming."

He could _feel_ her roll her eyes behind his back. "Whatever you say, pal."

###### 

"So." Xander lasted longer than she used to: she managed three full minutes of the requested silence before she broke. "You're still in California."

Which was fine by Spike, because if she'd held out much longer he would've had to give in and _ask_ , and that just wasn't on. "Looks like."

"Instead of, say, Europe."

He kept his face to the wind. "Why'd I wanna go there?"

"You wanna be cute about it? 'Cause two can play at that game. How do you like them local sports teams, Spike? Sure is a warm one today, huh?"

Christ, she could be a bitch. Darla could learn a thing or two, if she weren't dead twice over. "Fine. How is Herself, anyway?"

Xander eyed him, like she was thinking about making him suffer a bit longer, but then she relented. "She's good. Busy. Tracking down Slayers, setting up training teams, putting together recruitment packages-"

"Yeah, I saw the bloody commercial. 1-800-CHOSEN-1, is that it? Catchy."

"Hey, I didn't write it. Blame Andrew for that one."

"Believe me, there's blame enough to go around." Spike was silent for a moment, listening to the syncopated rhythm of their boots against the cracked pavement. "So she's still playin' the general, then? Runnin' the show, an' all?"

"Well, you know the Buffster. Can't pass up a chance for those inspiring speeches." Xander shrugged, hands shoved firmly in her pockets. "It's a whole new world order, you know? This time it's of Slayers, for Slayers, the whole deal. That meant a Slayer had to lead."

That sounded like Buffy, all right. The pang in his chest was almost sweet in its familiarity. "Plus she always was happier givin' orders than taking 'em."

"Well, yeah. There's that." They shared a smile until Xander had to look away to dodge a particularly murky and foul-smelling puddle. "Seriously, though, she's doing a great job. You'd be proud of her."

Like there was any question of _that._

"And she's got a lot of help. _Mucho_ support. Giles is handling most of the recruitment stuff - he's got this whole speech about 'the chain,' it's really touching, at least the first twenty times you hear it - and Willow is on this whole mystical walkabout, collecting witches and psychics and who knows what else. Dawn's our Junior Watcher, kept the rest of us organized when the recruits started pouring in, but she's going off to college this fall so she's training Andrew in her secret spreadsheet ways. Buffy might be in the driver's seat, but she's not doing it on her own."

"Least you lot finally learned that, at least." Took a couple apocalypses, maybe, but they got there in the end. "You left one off your list, though."

"Who?"

"You, you silly bint," he said, trying not to be amused and failing. "What're you up to these days? Rupert must be hard up for Watchers if he's takin' on _Andrew,_ but you're not exactly sportin' the tweed."

"I _could_ ," she said, instantly contrary. "I could be a tweed person. Maybe I'm just on vacation. Maybe I normally wear tweed every _day_."

He raised an eyebrow.

"I mean, I _don't,_ but I could." She shoved her hands in her pockets, chin set to a sulky angle. "You don't know me. I have layers."

"Maybe so, but I'd lay money none of 'em are tweed." He let his gaze wander pointedly from her faded hoodie down to the ragged cuffs of her jeans. "Maybe cotton poly-blend."

"Look, pal, you try spending half your life on a friggin' airplane and see how _your_ dress code holds up. Not like it matters if I stick to business casual, anyway."

"Travel then, is it? What's Herself got you doing?"

"Little bit of everything?" She shrugged, trying to look casual and not quite succeeding. "Pick up rare spellbooks, pay off dubiously hygienic underworld contacts, chase after rogue Slayers… You name it, at this point I've probably done it."

"So... you're the errand girl," he summarized.

"Well, if you want to be insulting about it, sure. But I prefer the term 'freelancer.' It sounds much cooler."

He studied her for a moment, safe in the knowledge that she couldn't see him. Habit had made her fall in at his right, which left him squarely in her blind spot. Xander sounded the way she always did: comfortably wry, ready to make herself the joke before anyone else could do it first. But there was something about it that rang just a little false.

"You like it?"

She tilted her head a little, as if she hadn't ever bothered to ask herself before. Bloody typical - and bloody sad, if you asked Spike. Which no one ever did.

"I'm good at it," Xander said, after a moment. "And someone needed to do it. Might as well be me."

Yeah, she hadn't changed a bit. "Surprised Anya lets you get away with it," he said, careful not to let the pity touch his voice. "The way you two were heading, I figured she'd've had you locked down with a minivan and sodding mortgage payment by now, but- What?" Xander had come to a dead stop, and he had to turn to look at her. She was glaring back at him, her funny-shaped mouth all compressed down into a flat line. "Fucksake, what'd I say _now?_ "

She had to swallow a couple times before she could answer. "Anya's dead, asshole."

Aw, bollocks. "When?" No, he knew when. " _How?_ "

"Bringers." Her mouth worked in something that wasn't quite a smile, but wasn't quite anything else, either. "Apparently, she saved Andrew's life."

The immortal Anyanka, brought low in defense of a bloke Spike wouldn't have bothered to bite. The universe had a funny sense of humor at times, that was a sodding fact. "Bloody poor trade, that."

Xander's laugh was a little watery. "Kinda what I said."

"I'm sorry, luv. I didn't know."

"Yeah, well." She ducked her chin, studying the toes of her boots with apparent fascination, but her censure came through loud and clear. "Maybe if you'd picked up a phone at some point, you would have."

Mother of _fuck,_ he should have known better than to think she'd let it go. "I told you already," he growled, "that didn't have anything to do with you. _Or_ Buffy," he added, as Xander opened her mouth. "Hard as it might be for you to believe."

"Oh, please, like you weren't Radio Summers: all Buffy, all the time. The guy who once bragged about being love's bitch doesn't get to play hurt feelings because I showed the pattern-recognition skills of your average toddler."

Alright, that might've been… a little fair. "Point still stands, luv," he said, grappling for the reins of his high horse for all he was worth. "I had my own problems, my own mess goin' on. I was a sodding _ghost_ for months, Wes bother to tell you that bit? At the first I probably would've hopped the first freighter 'cross the pond, but by the time I finally made it back…"

"You decided the last four years of your unlife didn't mean anything? That you dying, us mourning you - that didn't matter?"

_Us mourning you._ Oh, how sweet that would have been to know before. Back then, though… "To be honest, didn't think the lot of you would be all that sad to see me go."

Xander came to a sudden stop, her eye narrowing into a pissed-off slit. "Fuck. You."

"Tried that, ducks, and look how well that worked out."

They glared at each other, Dana forgotten, mutely furious in the briney dark of the alley. Just like old times, really. He half expected her to haul back and punch him in the gut - Slayer'd always preferred the nose, but Xander liked to see him double over. Liked him at her feet, making her feel powerful. He'd always sodding hated her for that.

But then the moment passed, and the years between them melted away, and Spike realized that the glitter in her eye wasn't anger at all. _Bollocks_. Always did let his tongue run ahead of his brain, didn't he, and Xander always had to bring out the worst in him, always poked and prodded right where it would hurt the most…

But just as he was opening his mouth to apologize - or something, 'sorry' wasn't exactly the kind of thing they said to each other - Xander broke first, spinning away with a curse to face the wall. Her shoulders were an exclamation point of tension under the too-big sweatshirt, and as he watched, a shaking hand came up to scrub through hair already mussed by a dozen such maneuvers. She always did that - could start the day tidy as you pleased, and by the end she'd look like a hedgehog with a power line up its arse.

Aw, Christ.

"Me too, yeah?" he said, and put a hand on her shoulder. "You know."

Nonsense words. Buffy would've socked him one, he tried to pass off that sorry excuse of an apology; Dawn would've made him start over and do it right. Xander just breathed something that might've been a laugh and let him have his moment before she shrugged him off.

"It's just," she said, after a moment. "It's just, do you know what I would _give_ to see Anya again? Hell, to just know she's _out_ there, somewhere, even if I never saw her again." When she finally turned to face him, her eye was wet with tears. "I'd give anything, Spike. _Anything._ "

"I know, luv." And he did, really, all too well. _One hundred and forty-seven days._ "The difference is, you loved your girl, more'n anything. Buffy doesn't-" Fuck him if he was going to say it a second time. The first had been bad enough. "Well, it's not the same, is it."

Xander studied him. "I thought you said it wasn't about Buffy."

"It's not. Well, it's tryin' not to be." This time he was the one running a hand over his head, restless, trying to find the right words. "Look, you ever think about destiny?"

She gave him a look of such gentle contempt that he had to laugh.

"Alright, s'pose it's on your mind more than most. Me, I never gave much of a toss for it. It's all death and duty and sodding Mountain Dew-"

"Huh?"

Right, if she hadn't heard about that humiliating interlude he wasn't in a hurry to enlighten her. "Point is, I never had much use for it, or it for me, and that suited me fine."

"But not anymore."

"Yeah, well." He struggled for an explanation that didn't involve the oh-so-pathetic 'blaze of glory' excuse he'd admitted to Harmony in a fit of drunken honesty, and found himself leaning on someone else's words instead. Words that maybe he'd taken a bit more to heart than he'd admitted at the time. "I'm tryin' to be something more than just the bloke who does the thing in front of him so he can impress the bloody girl."

Xander looked less than impressed at Doyle's regurgitated wisdom. " _That's_ what this is about? You don't feel like a real hero unless you're doing it on your own?"

He snarled under his breath. "I came back from the _dead,_ Harris."

"Yeah, I know."

"Do you? Because I'm thinkin' you're missing the soddin' point, here, luv. I wasn't brought back; I _came_ back. No witch, no chanting, no bloody Urn of Osiris - just that sodding amulet and a flash of light, and good-bye, fiery death and misery, hello, William the Bloody. In the flesh. Well, eventually."

"You think the Powers stepped in. Like when they pulled Angel out of hell."

"I don't know about any bloody _Powers_ , but _something_ seems to have a use for me, still." He wasn't going to mention the visions. Not until he was sure she wouldn't go tattling to Angel. "There's something left for me to do, here. And as much as I'd like to think otherwise, I don't think my sodding _destiny_ is across the pond, playing sidekick to the one girl in all the world who just made sure she doesn't need any more sodding help."

Xander flinched at that, oddly enough. He had to replay the speech in his head to figure out what part of that tweaked _her_ tail, but by the time he twigged she was already talking again, lip curled up in a reflexive sneer.

"Sounds like it's less about what Buffy _doesn't_ need, and more about what you _do_. Which is- I mean, whatever, you do you or whatever the fuck, but the least you could do is leave her out of your bullshit rationalization."

"I wasn't-" _Sod me, why am I explaining myself to Xander fucking Harris, anyway?_ "You know what, forget it. Dunno why I thought you might understand. You never had an original thought in your-" Something tugged at his senses, plucking at his nerves like a bow across the string. "In your-"

"Spike, buddy?" Her face was all polite bafflement. "We were kinda in the middle of an argument, here. You wanna share with the class?"

"I thought I heard…" No, not heard exactly. It wasn't a sound. Smelled? Felt? "There's something…"

There was no warning. Xander let out a grunt of pain, too quiet to be a yell and too abrupt to be a moan, and just _went down_ , like a sack of bricks. Spike took an involuntary step forward and froze, staring at the dark-haired girl who'd appeared behind her like a ghost. She was watching him back like a cat at the mouse hole, someone else's blood across her knuckles and nothing at all in her eyes.

Spike dropped into a crouch, keeping the demon from his face with some effort. _Slayer,_ his instincts whispered, so urgently he couldn't believe he hadn't felt it before. _Slayer._ "There you are, luv. Been lookin' everywhere for you."

Dana blinked at him, her dark eyes huge and liquid in the moonlight. "Could've danced all night."

"Not tonight, pet. Got places to be, people to see." Friends to rescue. No, no, he couldn't let himself worry about Xander. She had a hard head, had taken worse - from him, even - and come back with a smile and a snide remark. _Focus, William._ "Don't suppose you'll make this easy and come quiet, will you?"

She swayed, her body moving on liquid joints while her head stayed perfectly still, her eyes never leaving his. "Heart and head," she mumbled. "Head and heart. Cut it off, cut it out. Only way to be sure."

Not quiet, then. Probably too much to hope. Slayers never went quiet.

"Alright, ducks," he told her. "You want to dance, we can dance."

"Only way to be sure," she repeated, with a sly, sideways look - and ran.

Spike hesitated a second, looking from her fleeing form to Xander's still one on the ground. Then he cursed and took off after her.

###### 

Angel was in traffic when his phone rang, a jaunty chirp so at odds with his black mood that he almost snapped the thing in half when he flipped it open. "This better be good."

"She took him."

The voice on the other end was so totally flat that it took him a moment to recognize the speaker. "Xander?" Beside him, Wesley looked up sharply from his Blackberry, his brows drawing together with a snap. "Where are you? What's going on?"

"Dana. We found her, alright, but she got the jump on us, knocked me out, and took Spike."

Angel acceded to Wesley's frantic gesturing and thumbed the phone over to speaker, tossing it down to the center console between them. "What do you mean, she _took_ Spike?" he repeated, for Wesley's benefit.

"What the fuck do you think I mean? I mean she took him. Kidnapped. Vamp-napped. Removed from the mean streets to her evil lair. Do I need to keep going here? It's not a fucking complicated concept."

Good to know she still babbled under stress. "What the fuck happened?"

"Not sure, seeing as how she knocked me fucking unconscious at the time, but there's a lot of broken pallets and an empty syringe, so I'm going to guess a fight, followed by Spike getting drugged and, say it with me class, kidnapped."

Jesus Christ, this was the last thing he needed right now. "How do you know Spike didn't take her?"

"Spike wouldn't have left me to wake up in an alley."

Angel wasn't so sure about that. Spike wasn't exactly known for considering the consequences before he did something stupid. But there was the syringe to consider. The odds of Spike using anything aside from his fists to subdue an opponent was… he was gonna say 'low,' but knowing Spike it was more like 'nonexistent.' If drugs had been used in that fight, Dana was the one who used them.

"Hold tight," he told her. "We're on our way."

A familiar snort of disdain. "I didn't call you for a rescue, Deadboy. I called you for the fucking address."

_Oh, shit._

"I don't have it," Angel lied, hanging an abrupt left the wrong way down a one-way street. Fuck it, the cops were welcome to throw a ticket at him if they wanted. "We're still working on it. I'll call you as soon as-"

"Bullshit. You just said you were on your way."

That's right, he did. Angel threw a frantic look at Wes, who shook his head but nonetheless smoothly picked up the dangling threads of Angel's lie. "Xander, this is Wesley. All the psychic could give us was a general area. We're bringing a search team with trackers, we'll be able to narrow it down from there."

That was pretty good, actually. Too bad Xander didn't buy it. "Yeah, right. If a search team would work, you would've done it earlier. You found something."

God damn it, why couldn't she be stupid? He vaguely remembered her doing stupid shit all the time, why not now? "Xander," he said, knowing even as he did it that it was going to be futile, "you know I can't tell you that."

"Oh, give over! Do you think you're some kind of expert because you talked one Slayer down?" In the background, he could pick out the angry report of boots on concrete as she paced back and forth. "Or hey, maybe it's not that. Maybe it's just because you really _get_ it, what happens to a girl when she can't handle her visions." Her voice dropped, all slick snide insinuation. "I mean, you're the expert on the subject, aren't you?"

"Fuck off," he told her, over the ringing in his ears. Xander always fucking played dirty. He should've remembered that, even after all these years. "I don't have time to sit here and listen to-"

"I swear to God," she said flatly, "that if you hang up on me, it will be the last thing you do."

"I wasn't going to hang up," Angel lied. "But I'm not going to give you the address so you can run in and get yourself killed trying to save Spike."

Christ, he couldn't even figure why she'd _want_ to. Angel knew why he was doing this - annoying as he was, Spike was still the closest thing he had to family. What was Xander's excuse?

"That," she said, very precisely, "is not your call."

Maybe not, but if she got hurt because of him, Giles would turn him into road grit. "Your job was to help us find the Slayer, which you did. Now let me do my job and-"

"What, ride to the rescue? Newsflash for you, Angel: the only 'job' you had in this little operation was to lead me to Dana, which you are spectacularly failing to do."

Wesley held up a hand to prevent him from answering. "Xander," he said, with his 'calm the natives' voice. "Please, allow us to handle this. We're only a few miles away, with a full tactical response team accompanying-"

"And I'm on-site, with a full Slayer squad less than five minutes out," Xander broke in. Her voice was steady, no bullshit, just like every other time she'd threatened his life. "I've got them on the other line right now, just waiting for me to give them the address. Now, I'd like to give them Dana's. That's what they're here to do. But if you keep dicking me around for _one more minute_ I am sending them to Wolfram and Hart and you can deal with the fallout, because I am not fucking around here, Deadboy."

No, she wouldn't be. You could say a lot of things about Xander Harris, but when the chips were down, she was _there_ , one hundred percent. He could almost like her for that, if he wasn't always on the wrong side of her personal line.

"This is the moment where you get to decide," she told them. "Are you standing with us? Or are you standing against us? Because between you and me, kids, the ice you're standing on is getting pretty fucking thin. And you don't have a whole lot of people left who'd drop a line when you're drowning."

Angel stared at the road, at his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, at the cars flashing by outside, and fought the urge to tell her to go to hell.

Wes laid a hand on his arm. "She's in an old distillery," he told her, and rattled off the address. "She'll be in the basement, where Walter Kindel took her ten years ago. He was killed during a robbery gone wrong some years back. You can use that."

"Thanks," she said, and the line went dead.

"You shouldn't have done that," Angel said, after a moment.

Wes's hand dropped away. "Perhaps not," he said stiffly, and picked up his phone. "But she didn't leave us a great deal of choice."

"You know she probably doesn't even have any Slayers."

"Is that a risk we can afford to take? Even if they don't have a team stationed in the city right this moment, do you think that state of affairs will continue if we stonewall their representative - yes, even if it's for her own good," he corrected, before Angel could open his mouth. "We can't afford to set ourselves against the Council, Angel. Not as things stand presently."

Maybe not. But that didn't mean they had to be stupid about it. "Call dispatch. Tell them to send an ambulance."

We blinked, but his fingers didn't hesitate on the buttons. "For Dana?"

"For Xander." He clenched his hands on the wheel and wished he'd picked something a little more maneuverable than the fucking Hummer. Goddamn L.A. traffic… "She's not waiting for some Slayer squad that may or may not exist. She's going in."

"That would be unbelievably foolish. If even Spike couldn't stand against this Slayer- Yes, this is Pryce," Wesley said into the phone. "Send an ambulance to the same address. Immediately. Yes, with everything. Excellent."

"Foolish is that girl's middle name." Fucking Christ, he should have ordered a trace on her the second she left the building. If Xander got killed in his city, forget Giles, _Buffy_ was going to turn him into mincemeat. "She walked into a vampire nest the day she found out we existed, because they'd taken a friend of hers. You think she's going to let a Slayer stand in her way?"

"Surely she knows Spike can take care of himself," Wes said, but he sounded doubtful.

" _Spike_?"

"Good point." Wes's knuckles went white around the cell phone. "Perhaps you should drive faster."

"Believe me, I'm trying."

###### 

There were moments, Spike was learning, when everything came into focus around you. When reflection came into you on soft little feet, lighting up all of your choices in the harsh white glow of clarity. When you just had to stop and take stock of precisely all of the mistakes you'd made to get to this point, which in his case, was no sodding short list.

He was _learning_ , present tense, because he'd never been much of one for reflection _before,_ much less regret. But life had a way of teaching its lessons the hard way, and there wasn't much harder than the sight of his own hands in a trash bag on the floor.

"Stop, stop," he begged. His ears were still ringing from that last punch. Or was that the drugs? "You got it wrong. Your brain's all jumbled. I never hurt you. _It wasn't me._ "

Dana looked back over her shoulder, hair in her eyes, lip trembling. Sensing hesitation, Spike started talking faster, words tumbling over themselves in his urgency. "I've done my share of bad, but you're not one of 'em. It's someone else."

A step: slow, trembling, but there. Then another. Hard to know if she was willing to be convinced or not; Dru'd mostly _wanted_ to be talked out of her fits, liked the little snap back to awareness before she faded out again. That was on her good days. On her worst, she'd fight like a wildcat to keep from being pulled away from all those comfy familiar demons in her head. Spike had to figure the girl was in the same bad way, but he had to try. For Xander, if nothing else. No way Batvamp was going to ride to the rescue before some big nasty stumbled over Sleeping Beauty and made her into a Scooby-snack.

"You've got me confused with another man." Spike made his voice as low and coaxing as he could manage, past the haze of the drugs. "Visions are mixing with your real memories, alright? Got 'em stuff in your head." Dana was shaking her head now, frantic, but Spike pressed onward. The fuck else could he do? "Other slayers, other _places_. New York… China…"

She said something in Mandarin, a low liquid spill of syllables. Spike couldn't translate if you put a stake to his chest, but he knew what it meant, right enough.

"Yeah, that's what you're remembering. Other slayers."

She went to her knees before him, her joints supple, her face shattered. "You _killed_ her."

It took a moment for him to answer, and when it did, his voice was a scraped whisper. "Yes. But-"

"You killed them both."

What could he say to that? There was nothing. _Nothing._ Poor tyke should never have had the likes of that in her brain, not with everything else churning around up there. No one deserved to have Spike inside their head.

He closed his eyes and remembered: flames reflecting off the curve of a blade, flashing subway lights across rich dark leather. Buffy's face, too, when he'd told her of their ends, told her that Slayers were all just a little in love with death. Oh, but he'd wanted to be that death, hadn't he? He'd wanted it more than anything - and had learned, too late, that death was no kind of lover. Death was just an end, and Spike had been the end of so very many bloody, broken little girls.

"That and worse," he told her, and visions or no, she'd never know how true that was. His voice was nearly voiceless, a cracked whisper almost as broken as the inside of the poor bint's brain. And maybe it wasn't his to ask - pretty bloody sure it wasn't, in fact - but Spike still tried one last time for mercy he didn't deserve. "But I was never _here._ "

She stared at him, her eyes huge and dark and liquid. And for a moment, Spike thought- He thought that maybe-

But then her trembling lip stilled, and her fist flashed out once, twice, thrice. Good, square hits, powered out right from the hip and into his jaw like a pile driver. She hit him like the Slayer she was, and when he shook away the ringing in his ears she was kneeling up, fumbling with the saw. "Doesn't matter! Head and heart, head and heart. Keep cutting till you see dust!"

So. This was it, then. The saw lifted, silver-bright in the gleam of the lamps. Spike turned his face and waited for the end to come.

The door splintered open with a crash.

"Uh, hey, there." Spike's head snapped around at the familiar voice, and through the sedative haze he saw Xander's tall figure silhouetted in the broken doorway like some kind of avenging angel in jeans. "Some kids down on fourth told me there'd be a rave down here, but… No? Wrong number? Man, this is so awkward, I hate when that happens."

Above him, Dana was frozen, studying the intruder like a lion sizing up an antelope. "Xan," Spike croaked. "Get the fuck out of here."

"No can do, Fangless," Xander said steadily. There was a shine of something metal in her hands - a gun? But she didn't carry anymore, hadn't since Tara- "My contract has a strict 'no fatalities' clause, and it's a real bitch trying to cover international travel on your own, let me tell ya. Girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do."

"Animus," Dana said. "Heart."

"Uh, yeah." Spike didn't know what the fuck that was about, but Xander clearly did. "That's me. Full of heart. Heart-tastic. Heart-tacular. Also not a time of my life I'm eager to revisit, but hey, if you want to chat I'm here to listen-"

"The one who sees."

"That's right," Xander said, though only after a quick, steadying breath. There was a flash of pink, her tongue darting nervously across her lower lip, but her fuckoff big pistol never wavered so much as an inch. "If you know all that, do you know who saved the other one? Because he's the one sitting right there with a bone saw pointed at his head, and he doesn't deserve that."

" _Does,_ " Dana spit. "Hurt her. Hurt you. Hurt so many dirty girls…"

"That's Caleb, honey." Xander's voice went all soft and coaxing, inviting you to curl up and pull it around you like a blanket. Always had a way with the broken ones, did Xander. He should know. "Spike saved me. That's what he does, he saves people. The man who hurt you, his name was Walter Kindel. He's dead now, Dana. He's gone. He can't hurt you anymore."

"Not weak anymore."

"That's right, sweetheart. You're so strong. He'll never touch you again."

"Strong," Dana repeated. There was a new tension to her now, coiled like a spring. "Slayer."

And maybe Xander caught the gleam in Dana's dark eyes. Or maybe she just knew what it looked like when someone made up their mind, because Dana had Slayer speed on her side, but she didn't have time to do more than lift the saw above her head before Xander pulled the trigger.

###### 

"Yeah, Andrew, I used the tranq." Xander was leaning against the hood of Angel's absurdly oversized vehicle when Wesley finally caught up with her, a cell phone to her ear and a resigned expression on her face. "Theoretically she should be down for six, but with Slayer metabolism she might- Yeah, exactly. Nat's got my spares, but if you can have a medic waiting at the airp- Well look at you, Mr. Efficient. No, Nat can handle debrief, I'm gonna take a day before I head back. Because I've been in six time zones in three days, that's fucking why. Yeah. No. No, I- Your sympathy is appreciated, but- Okay, I'm hanging up now. Good _bye_ , Andrew." She flipped the phone closed with a vengeful snap. " _Berk_."

"You've gone native," Wesley said, and she jumped, hand going halfway to her chest before she caught herself and stopped.

"Jesus _Christ,_ Wes, get a bell or something."

"Apologies," he said, fighting not to duck his head like a guilty schoolboy. "I suppose you were somewhat distracted."

"Yep, that's Andrew for you." She cast a dark look at the phone in her hand. " _Distracting_ is the nicest thing someone's ever said about him."

"I've, ah. Heard some stories."

"Oh god, I bet. He used to tail around after Spike like a puppy with a crush, it was adorable-slash-pathetic. Adorathetic. There were a few times I thought Spike was gonna strangle him, soul or not." She scrubbed her hands over her face, huffing a laugh into her palms. "Jesus. Not so likely now, is it?"

"Wolfram and Hart employs the best shamanic healers in the continental United States," Wesley assured her. "Reattaching a limb is more than within their capabilities, even without vampiric healing. They've informed me that Spike will be right as rain in no time."

"What does that even mean?" Xander wondered. "'Right as rain.' What's so right about rain?"

"Not so native as all that, I suppose," Wesley said, amused. "It's… well, I suspect it's one of those things that only makes sense to an Englishman."

"Add it to the list," she said darkly. "Seriously, though. Spike's gonna be okay?"

"Physically, at least. I'm sure I can't speak to his mental state after such an ordeal."

"He's bounced back from worse," she said, with a philosophical shrug, but he noticed a faint tremor to her hands as she shoved her phone in her pocket. "Give him a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes and he'll be - ha ha - right as rain."

"Of course," Wesley murmured. He considered leaving it there, but Xander seemed to be in a talkative mood and he couldn't help but take advantage. "I notice that you didn't mention anything about him in your report to Mr. Wells."

"Yeah, well." She gnawed distractedly on the edge of her thumbnail, then seemed to realize she was doing it and dropped her hand to her side. "I mean, don't get me wrong, I still think he's being a fucking _idiot_ about this, but… It's his call. If he wants some time to figure out his destiny or what-the-fuck-ever, I'm not going to get in the way."

Wesley let out a breath. "That was… more or less the conclusion we drew, as well."

Xander snorted. "Angel just didn't want him going back to Buffy."

"Well, yes." They shared a smile. "There is that, as well."

"Too bad. Much as I love making Angel miserable, I think this time I'm gonna back Spike's play. He deserves that much."

"Ms. Summers might disagree."

"Not the first time Buffy's had a mad-on at me about Spike. I'm a big girl, I can cope."

"Was it…" Spike had spoken only very vaguely about the year before the fall of Sunnydale, but Wesley had managed to piece together a few things. "I know there was an, ah, attempt on his life, but…"

"That? Oh fuck no, I had nothing to do with that one." Luckily, Xander didn't seem offended at the implication; in fact her face was softening, something like amusement tugging at the corner of her mouth. "I'm talking about the time the entire Scooby gang, _including_ my ex-girlfriend, got an eyeful of me and Spike drowning the sorrows of the recently single the old-fashioned way."

"Why would they have a problem with the two of you drinking togeth-" The penny dropped. "Oh."

"Yeah." Xander rocked on her heels, the faint smile growing stronger. "That's the look I got back then, too. Except with more shouting. And medieval weaponry."

"I can… imagine," Wesley said weakly. He really, really couldn't. "I'm sorry, I hadn't realized."

"Why would you? It's ancient history. But, uh. In the line of _not_ so ancient history…" She scrubbed a hand uneasily through her hair. "Look, about earlier. With the whole, 'threatening a Slayer invasion,' thing…"

She visibly groped for a way to end the sentence, and Wesley decided to take pity on her. "It's quite alright," he said, and even mostly meant it. "You were concerned for your friend."

"Is that what he is?" Xander rolled her eye. "Whatever. My point is, I'm pretty sure I crossed a line back there, so I'm sorry for that. I mean, uh, not so sorry I probably wouldn't do it again, 'cause it worked, but-"

"Yes, thank you, I take your meaning," Wesley said, deciding to be amused rather than offended. "I'm simply glad things worked out as they did. I'm sure the Council has more specialized care for Dana than we'd be able to provide."

"Also, no offense, but nobody trusts Wolfram and Hart with a Slayer of their own. I know, I know, it's not Wolfram and Hart, it's Angel and Company," she said, before he could say anything. "I get it. I'm not judging - it's not like the Council was all fun and games before we moved in, you know? I'm just saying. There's a reason you guys don't have the best reputation right now. It's like… whatshisname, the guy with the whale?"

"I beg your pardon?" Wesley said, totally lost.

"You know, the one who got eaten. Jonas."

"Ah, I think you mean Jonah."

"Right. That guy. Maybe to you guys, you feel like you're steering the ship, you know? But to everyone else, it just looks like you dove into a giant fish and got eaten."

"That's…" Wesley considered and discarded a number of responses as impolitic. "I can understand that, I suppose."

"But it still sucks not to be trusted? Yeah, I hear that. And hey, Jonah made it out in the end. Could be in a year or two, a whole lot of people are going to owe you a whole lot of apologies. But right now you guys aren't exactly winning any popularity contests."

"Yes, we've… been informed as such," Wesley said delicately. "But I was unaware the Council shared that opinion."

"Officially, they don't. Unofficially?" She spread her hands in a shrug. "They're a diverse bunch. Most of them never set foot in Sunnydale. And your boss is a vampire. What do you expect?"

"What indeed," he murmured. He supposed he wasn't really surprised, not after the cyborg with his father's face, but… still. He'd expected better of Buffy, at least. Then again, it was as Xander said - it was a large organization, and growing larger every day. And as they'd had cause to learn, the Council wasn't the only large-scale organization that purported to serve the forces of good.

Hmm. Something he'd have to consider further. Under less… fraught circumstances.

"You mentioned your intentions to rest and recover," he said, deciding a graceful change of subject was just what the doctor ordered. "Wolfram and Hart does maintain suites for guests in your situation, if you're in need of accommodation."

"No thanks."

It stung, even though he'd expected it. "Or I could arrange a reservation at the hotel of your choosing, if that would make you feel more comfortable?"

"Oh, that's not the issue," she said, with gratifying quickness. "I just mean, I only said that to Andrew because I couldn't exactly tell him I wanted to check on Spike, you know? I figured I'd hang around until he got out of surgery and then steal his keys and crash at his place." She grinned. "It's the least he could do, considering how often he's mooched off me."

"Not to mention your timely intervention tonight."

"Right? It's only fair."

They shared an exhausted smile, perfectly in charity for one tremendously comforting moment. "Well, in that case, may I at least offer you a ride back to the office?" Wesley said, after a moment. "I believe Angel will be onsite for a while yet, and I should get a start on the paperwork if I have any hope of seeing my own bed sometime before dawn."

Xander caught the direction of his glance and turned to study Angel's ridiculous vehicle. "Why am I not surprised that Angel drives a Hummer," she said, after a moment, and despite the entire atrocious night Wesley found himself suppressing a laugh.

"Among other things," he said diplomatically, and held out a hand. "Shall we?"

###### 

Angel was stuck onsite for over an hour, and when he finally wrapped things up he was met with the discovery that his car was missing - _thanks a lot, Wes_ \- so he had to catch a ride back with the forensics team, and even by his standards those guys were creepy. By the time he made it back to the office the night was most of the way gone and he was in a foul mood.

Still, poor temper was no excuse to act like a complete jackass - or so people kept telling him, anyway - so after a wavering moment in the elevator, he heaved a deep sigh and hit the button for the medical wing. A few minutes of increasingly irritated questions netted him the information that Spike was still in surgery - _thanks, higher powers_ \- so he gave in to temptation and went to visit Cordelia instead. He didn't see her so often anymore, just on the bad nights, but this had been a _really_ bad night. He'd just... take a peek, reassure himself that she was still breathing, and then head back up.

The last thing he expected to find was Xander in the visitor's chair.

"You can stop lurking, you know," she said, not looking up. She was playing with a familiar-looking lighter, flipping it open and closed in a fast, irregular rhythm. "I know you're there."

"I don't lurk," he said automatically, but he still stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. "By the way, if you use that in here I'll make you eat it."

Xander gave him a speaking look. "Do I _look_ suicidal to you? If I tried to light up next to Cordelia she'd wake up just for the pleasure of smacking me into the next millennium."

He could almost wish she would, just for that. It wouldn't work, of course. If anger at her friends' choices was enough to bring Cordelia out of a coma, he would have driven her to it months ago.

"Besides," Xander added, slouching a little more aggressively in the chair, "I finished the pack already."

Come to think of it, she _did_ smell like smoke - and not just any smoke, but Spike's brand, the same cheap imports he'd favored since at _least_ the seventies. Angel hadn't thought anything of it, because she'd been holding Spike when they burst into the warehouse, her surprisingly effective little dart gun trained on Dana's unconscious body while she supported Spike with her other arm. It made sense that she'd smell like Spike - but that wasn't secondhand smoke on her clothes, and that was definitely Spike's lighter she was playing with.

Jesus. What _was_ it with those two? He was pretty sure it wasn't some kind of love affair: for all his faults, Spike was about as faithful as they came. And besides, he never would've been able to keep his yap shut about it. The only time Xander had featured in Spike's stories was in the background, a bit player in some new morality tale about Why Spike Loved Buffy the Best, and even then Spike had mostly sounded exasperated. It was hard to imagine them getting _along,_ much less- anything else.

"When did you start smoking, anyway?" Angel asked, because 'anything else' was the last thing he wanted to be thinking about now, or for that matter ever. "I thought you were into that 'my body is a temple' stuff."

"Are you joking? I worshiped at the temple of Hostess snack products. _Cordelia_ was the one who went for all of that crap; I just pretended to go along because she wouldn't kiss me otherwise." She shrugged philosophically - _dames, whaddaya gonna do? -_ and shoved the lighter in her pocket. "Then she stopped kissing me anyway, so."

"Hey, about that," Angel said, because that reminded him. "Why did you two break up, anyway? I always wondered."

"You seriously don't know?"

"I was a little out of the loop on gossip back then," Angel said dryly.

"No, I mean, Cordelia didn't tell you? You've been friends for- what, four years? Time was she couldn't hold onto a secret for longer than five minutes."

"She, uh, didn't talk about you much," Angel said, a little awkwardly. Xander raised her eyebrows, clearly seeing through his cautious understatement, and he cleared his throat. "She pretty much exclusively referred to you as 'the Aberration.'"

Far from getting offended, Xander smiled a little mistily down at the bed. "That's my girl," she said fondly. "Holding grudges to the end."

Bit hypocritical, coming from Xander, but Angel decided to refrain from pointing that out. "So?" he said. "What'd you do to piss her off?"

"I'd get offended that you think it's my fault, but with Cordelia it's always someone else's fault." Xander finally stopped fiddling with the lighter and shoved it in her pocket, folding her hands across her stomach. "It was because of Spike, actually. Weirdly enough."

"Huh," Angel said, but no, even on second thought, he couldn't make it make sense. "How'd _that_ work?"

"Do you remember when he kidnapped me and Willow in senior year? Because he wanted Willow to brew him a love potion?"

"It rings a bell," Angel said, very dry.

"Yeah, well, he kept going on and on about Drusilla, and how long they'd been together, and the meaning of love and all that stuff- I mean, he was blasted out of his skull, and you know what he's like when he's drunk-"

He sure as hell did, but what was more interesting was how _Xander_ knew, well enough for that tone of familiar exasperation. "Yeah, one bottle down and he's halfway to poetry."

"Right, well, I was only dubiously conscious at that point, what with the blunt-force head trauma, but it wasn't like there was much else to listen to, and… If you tell anyone about this, I _will_ find your hair gel, and I _will_ put holy water in it," she said, with sudden ferocity. "Don't test me, buster, I've got skills."

"I'm terrified," Angel said flatly. "Get to the point, before one of us dies of old age."

"Yeah, yeah." Xander scowled down at the toes of her boots, fiddling with the string on her hoodie. "He might have… made an impression. The speech, I mean, not the head trauma, though for all I know he might have managed that too, it's not like any of us ever went to the hospital if we could avoid it."

Angel parsed that tangled speech out of Xander-ese and into something like an actual confession. "He got to you."

"He got to me," she sighed. "Don't get me wrong, he was still pretty horrifying - I _really_ didn't need to know that much about the merits of various body fluids as lube - and maybe it was the head wound talking, but I couldn't help but think that it must be... nice. To have someone love you that much."

"Ah," Angel said, and she flashed him a short, tight smile.

"Yeah. So, after he wandered off to go torture Drusilla or whatever his amazing plan was, and you and Buffy rode very nobly to our rescue-"

"You were waiting out front," Angel said, irritated all over again at the memory. "Because you _needed a ride_."

"It's a very dangerous part of town! You should know, you killed like twenty people there."

Angel growled.

"An-y-way, after all that I went home and slept the sleep of the triumphant and vaguely traumatized, and the next morning it turned out I still felt the same way. So I called Cordy and-" She blew air through her lips in a little _pfft_ and mimed an explosion. "It wasn't pretty."

"Yeah, I figured _that_ much," said Angel, because friendly breakups did not attract vengeance demons. Not that he was going to mention that to Xander. Contrary to what some people seemed to think, he did have _some_ tact. "So, Spike. Huh." It made a ridiculous, sideways kind of sense. By Sunnydale logic, anyway. "Bet he's proud of that one. All that chaos and he wasn't even trying."

"I never told Spike, are you joking? I'd never hear the end of it. You don't just _hand_ him ammunition like that if you value your dignity."

With no small effort, Angel managed to bite back the obvious joke about Xander and dignity. "He's _your_ friend," he said, instead.

"Ugh, let's not go too far." She scrunched up her nose, so exactly like Buffy in a pout that Angel would have lost his breath, if he'd had any. "He's my… acquaintance. Comrade, if you must. Occasional roommate, sporadic drinking buddy, terminal pain in my ass. He was always just-" She gestured helplessly. " _There._ And then once he got his soul-"

Angel couldn't quite help the snort that escaped him. Xander rolled her eye.

"Why does it not surprise me you have a chip on your shoulder about that?" she said - apparently rhetorically, as she immediately continued, "Look, just because you're not the only kid on the block anymore, doesn't mean he's got the Discount Dan version for you to sneer at. We're all special in our own special ways, as the puppets say."

Angel knew it was bait, he was a couple centuries old and he'd baited enough people that he _knew_ it was bait, but he still couldn't help muttering, "You know his story's probably bullshit, right? His grand wish to be worthy of the girl? He probably said some stupid vague threat and got monkey's-pawed into it and made up the story later to feel better about himself."

"Does it matter?" Xander said. "I mean- yeah, no, that absolutely sounds like him, don't get me wrong, but… he fought for it, he bled for it, and when the time came he sealed it with a sacrifice. Seems to me it shouldn't matter how it happened so much as what he did with it, and he saved the damn world. _Also,_ " she added, back to glaring now, "you're a fine one to talk, with a big cosmic accident of a curse dogging _your_ heels. At least _Spike's_ soulis stuck on tight, _Angelus._ "

That one stung, all the more because she wasn't wrong. Xander always knew just where to dig in the goddamn knife. "Fine, whatever. He's a regular damn puppy dog. But don't come in here talking about sacrifice. Spike doesn't know the first meaning of the word-"

She opened her mouth.

"-and _neither do you,_ " he continued, enjoying her glare. "I went to hell for a _century._ I gave up _everything_ for this mission, not once but over and over, and I-" He thought of Connor, that terrible lost look in his eyes. Raising the knife high. "You don't know what I've lost. You _can't_."

"Maybe not," she said low. "But you've got a lot of nerve saying that to a woman with one eye."

"...yeah," Angel said, after a moment. He might've forgotten that, for just a moment there. "That's fair."

"Damn skippy it is," Xander snapped, but her voice had lost some of its punch. She sighed, after a moment; slouched lower in her chair and folded her hands over her stomach. "He suffered too, you know," she said finally. "Maybe not a hundred years of torment, but it wasn't nothing. The First used his head as a football, made him kill and sire a bunch of people, and then just straight-up tortured him half to death. Do you know how much torture it takes to half-kill a vampire?" She snorted, then rolled her eye in his direction. "Jesus, of course you do. Forgot who I was talking to."

"Hey, as far as me and Spike are concerned, the torture was strictly one-way." _This century, anyway,_ his conscience prodded him. "There were pokers involved."

"My heart bleeds." She stretched her legs out in front of her, staring moodily at Cordelia's bed. "I had to patch him up, after. He didn't even recognize me - thought I was _Drusilla_ , for fuck's sake."

Angel studied the side of her face. Yeah, she had the dark hair, and the admittedly striking bone structure, but… "I don't see the resemblance," he said honestly. There was too much… warmth, to her. Too much sun and soul and blood. Even when she was alive, Drusilla always had a look that said she was made for moonlight. Probably what drew ickle William to her in the first place, poor bastard.

"Thank you." Any drier, and her voice could be used as kindling. "That makes me feel much better."

"You're welcome. Here to help."

"But that's what I'm saying!" Xander threw up her hands. "He _is_ here to help. Maybe not the way you'd go about it, but hell, that's a recommendation in my book. And he's been doing it since _before_ he got a soul." She leveled him a hard look, twisting around in her chair to face him. "Even then, as a being of pure evil blah blah blah, he found a way to teach himself to be something like a good man. Can you say the same?"

He didn't know why he said it. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, wearing on into the dark of the morning when even he was usually thinking about bed. Maybe it was because he was used to coming here and pouring his unpleasant truths into Cordy's uncaring ears. Or maybe it was the freedom of saying it to someone who wouldn't bother to pat him (metaphorically) on the shoulder and give him the 'I'm sure you're wrong,' speech. Xander was always happy to believe the worst of him, and so Angel looked away from her accusing eye and back at Cordy's bed and he just said it.

"Truth is, I don't know if I can say that even _with_ a soul."

Xander didn't fire back with an immediate scathing agreement, which left him obscurely irritated, like she'd dropped her cue just to spite him. When he glanced over at her, she was studying him with all the intensity she used to give the last donut in the box: lips slightly pursed, a furrow in her brow. Making up her mind.

"That's really sad," she said finally.

"Yeah. Now you're getting it."

###### 

Spike couldn't rightly say that she snuck up on him, because he heard her coming from half a bloody hospital away. All the grace and poise of a drunken giraffe, as always, and all the charm of a baby panda, trailing apologies and smiles alike in her wake. He wondered if she'd ever realized how rare that was, that kind of easy personal magnetism. Probably not. Xander'd always been too busy jumping through hoops to make sure people liked her to realize that most of 'em already did.

So no, it wasn't like he didn't know she was coming. But it was still a surprise, somehow, when she stuck her head through his door with a grin that seemed to light up the gloomy little room.

"Oh good," she said, "you're up."

He rolled his eyes to combat his traitorous mouth, which kept trying to curl upwards in an answering smile. "What are you even doing here? Got your Slayer already, would've thought you'd've fucked off back to the motherland by now."

"Oh please, like I was going to leave without a proper 'I told you so.' It's like you don't even know me."

"Better'n I'd like," he grumbled, but his heart wasn't in it and they both knew it. He raised an eyebrow at the bundle she dumped on the end of the bed: boots, clothes, and duster, the sleeves already scrubbed clean of his blood. "What's all this, then?"

"Uh, your stuff?" She gave him a look like maybe he got hit on the head and she didn't notice. "I mean, far be it for me to criticize your vamp detective bit, but if you can't even recognize your own-"

"I _meant,_ " he growled, torn between laughter and the (currently futile) urge to strangle her, "what's it doing _here?_ Not a lot of use for it while I'm stuck in this bed."

"Well, that would be why I'm springing you." She picked up his jeans and unfolded them with a professional snap. "Chop chop, we don't got all night."

Spike looked between her and his bandaged wrists pointedly. His fingers were about as useful as a pair of curled-up dead spiders, and he lifted them, flopping and sore, to demonstrate this fact. "Don't think I'm up to a midnight caper at the moment, ducks."

That earned him the eyebrow of disdain. "Don't be stupid. I'll help you." This settled, she motioned him off the bed and brandished the jeans at him, an expectant look on her face.

Ah, sod it. Wasn't like he had anything she hadn't seen before; she'd patched up just about every part of him, one time or another, and any bits left undiscovered by way of medical misadventure had been introduced during their scotch-fueled romp on the research table. She'd seen him filthy, stinking, raving from the basement - and also, variably: starving, burned, beaten, cut to pieces, and on at least one memorable occasion, so drunk he couldn't stand up straight. He didn't have a lot of room left for shame when it came to Xander Harris.

She got his jeans on with a minimum of fuss, doing up his button fly with agile fingers like she dressed blokes every day of her life, and knelt down to put on his boots. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, ignoring the instinctive twitch of interest from his cock at the sight of her dark head dipping low. _Not like you could do anything about it anyway, you stupid sod,_ he told himself. _All the drugs and shite in your system? You'd be lucky to get it up, much less finish._

She finished with his boots smartish - apparently not noticing anything amiss, thank christ - and stood up to bully him into his shirt as well. Luckily it wasn't one of his tighter t-shirts, and she got it over his head with a minimum of fuss and wriggling. And then she picked up his coat, and memory clobbered him over the head like a sodding two-by-four.

Sunnydale, 2001. The morgue under the hospital, cool and dark and empty - unfamiliar then, though he'd know every inch of the place by the time summer was done. Unfamiliar to him, at least: Xander had threaded her way around the tables like she was the one who could see in the dark, ignoring the other, less lively dead bodies with the thoroughness of the truly jaded and returning with a couple of packs of A neg and a shitload of bandages. She'd done her little Florence Nightingale routine while he drank, wrapping him up like a mummy to keep his battered insides from becoming outsides, and even after all that he'd still needed help getting back into his clothes. She'd held out his coat, just like this, and he'd gone to it like the arms of an old lover.

Funny thing, regret. He'd thought he'd known what it meant then, watching Xander scrub Buffy's blood out from under her nails in the morgue sink and feeling the salt-sting of tears on his cracked lips. He hadn't known _shite._ The thing you failed to do was _nothing_ compared to the things you'd already done, and couldn't take back.

When he managed to drag his gaze up to Xander's face, it was to find something not unlike sympathy in her dark eye. "It's okay if you don't want to."

He had to figure Xander knew a thing or two about reminders, considering the one she had strapped to her face. Could've gotten a fake, nice enough you couldn't tell the difference; probably could've even talked Red into magicking her up a replacement, good as new. If she was still wearing the patch, it was on purpose.

He didn't answer, and her face softened minutely. "And if you do want to, that's okay, too."

What Spike _wanted_ was to pretend that he didn't know what she was talking about, but he was probably a couple years late for that, wasn't he? "I shouldn't."

She had to be tired, holding the coat up like that, but her hands didn't waver. "Never let that stop you before."

He bowed his head, and she moved around behind him, sliding the duster up on his shoulders. He felt his spine straightening up under the familiar weight of it, both comfort and goad. He'd done this before, rebuilt himself into the monster they needed to wage their war, but that was when Herself had asked it of him. How the buggering fuck was he supposed to do it on his own?

Xander circled him, a swish of fabric and the squeak of boots on the tiled floor, and smoothed the leather in place over his shoulders, a quick tug to settle the lapels. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, and she was right there, her forehead hot against his.

"'m really soddin' tired, luv."

Her sigh washed over his face, blood-warm and smelling like his cigarettes. "I know, buddy."

"Just wanna go home."

"Yeah. I hear that." She hooked a hand around the back of his neck for just a moment, then gave it a friendly squeeze and straightened, a miser's half-smile tugging warmly at the corner of her mouth. "C'mon. Let's get out of here."

###### 

It had started raining at some point while he was in surgery, which caused Xander to snort for some reason. She didn't try to help him into the car or anything - had his pride, he did, though admittedly not a lot of it at the moment - but she did open the door for him, and without further comment, too, which had to qualify as some sort of bloody miracle. He slid into the passenger seat and managed to shut the door behind him with an elbow, then rested his head against the glass, too tired to so much as consider faffing about with the seatbelt. Not like he hadn't gone through a windshield or two in his day.

Xander was quiet on the way back to his place, flicking the stereo over to some public radio classical program and leaving Spike to his thoughts. It'd be oddly decent of her, if alone with his thoughts was anywhere he wanted to be. He considered breaking the silence himself, but couldn't think of anything to say. They'd more or less said their respective pieces already, hadn't they? There wasn't much left. So he just stared out the window at the rain-slicked streets and listened to the sob of the violins and did his best to think of nothing.

The day finally caught up to him halfway down the steps to his basement flat, sudden and overwhelming like a wall looming up in the dark. He stumbled hard into the wall opposite, banging his wrist against the brick and only barely stifling his grunt of pain. Bugger, bugger, bugger-

The hand on the back of his neck was more reassuring than it had any right to be. "You're an idiot," Xander informed him, insinuating herself under his arm. Felt like a bloody furnace, even through the coat. "Keys?"

Right. Because he wouldn't be able to work the lock on his own. Buggering _fuck._ "Duster. On the-" She was already emerging from his pocket, keys looped around his fingers. "Yeah. Brass one in the middle."

She set about undoing the deadbolts with a raised eyebrow. "Expecting company?"

"Better safe than sorry. Not like I've been makin' friends."

"You can say that again." She shouldered him through the door and stripped him of his coat with ruthless efficiency before dropping him unceremoniously onto the couch. "Stay there."

He closed his eyes, the room swimming around him. Fucked up, hurting, full of drugs and blood - time was, he'd've paid through the nose for a night like this. 'Course, time was he'd be getting his cock sucked right about now, too.

"Trust me, pet. I'm not going sodding anywhere."

The locks clicked shut one after another - could take the girl out of the Hellmouth, etc - and then he heard her move over to the kitchen. "You still eat people food, right? I'm fucking starving."

"Should be some leftover curry in the fridge." He didn't bother asking her preference; Xander would eat sodding anything. "Get me a beer while you're in there."

"Bossy," she said, but a minute later there was a _click-hiss_ and a cold bottle landed in his hand. Well, hands. His grip wasn't all there yet. "It's open."

"Ta."

He lay there, drinking his beer and listening to her bang around the kitchen, slamming cabinet doors and muttering under her breath and generally making a nuisance of herself. The racket was both familiar and oddly soothing: he'd done a couple stints as her houseboy over the years, and one thing that never changed was her inability to keep anything like quiet when she first woke up. She was useless before her first cuppa, couldn't do anything but stumble around like a zombie on crack. That last time, shuffled off into her closet like the setup to a lame joke, he'd found he even kind of liked it, a daily reminder that there was something out there besides his own ghosts. He'd get in a little before dawn - never wondering where all the hours went, _why did he never sodding wonder_ \- and then lie there till her alarm went off, just so he could listen to her wake up and grumble around in search of coffee. Not loud, really; not trying to wake him, nothing like that. Just sleepy and clumsy and human.

The bottle was plucked summarily out of his hands, and he roused himself enough to glare at her. " _Hey._ "

"Please, you weren't drinking it anyway." She drained the last few inches of liquid and twisted to set it aside. Her shirt rode up at the motion, revealing a pale strip of skin at her waist. "C'mon, kick over."

Bemusedly, he sprawled more heavily on the couch, making room for her between his thighs. She immediately set to work undoing his belt. "Harris."

"Yeah?"

"What're you doin', luv?"

"What's it look like?"

_Like you read my sodding mind,_ he thought, as she finished with his belt and started working on his fly. "Like you're takin' advantage of my weakened state."

"Bingo." She tugged, encouraging him to lift his hips. "I've patched you up often enough - and listened to you _bitch_ often enough - that I think I've got your post-injury routine pretty much down cold. You've had some drugs, had some blood, so now-" She shucked the jeans down to his thighs. "-it's time for a wank."

She put an arch twist on the word, a lazy mimic of his accent that came out sounding more like _Giles_ than anything else, but it still tugged a perverse twitch of interest out of his cock. "Dunno if you forgot this, pet, but I can't do much of fuck-all with my hands right now."

"Right," she said, like he was an idiot. "So I figured you could use a hand." She rested her chin on his thigh and grinned up at him. "Or, y'know. Whatever."

Oh, bloody hell, she'd read his mind after all. "Harris-"

He hadn't gotten as far as figuring out what he was going to say after that, but it didn't much matter because she didn't give him a chance. "You think too much," she told him, ducking her head. Her next words were mumbled against the cut of his hip, but he still heard them, clear as day. "Just let me take care of you for a bit."

Almost word-for-word the same thing he'd told her the night she got home from the hospital. Only he'd been worse, hadn't he, all _sweetheart_ and _darling_ and _pretty girl,_ a long murmur of sweet nothings as he'd got her out of the clothes that smelled like hospital, had washed her clean of all the sweat and blood and pain. Had tucked her away in bed, all nice and snug-like, and then he'd sat on the floor outside her door like a sodding dog, listening to her sob and snuffle her way through the night. Had promised himself that _this_ time he'd be faster, _this_ time nothing would-

Back in the present, Xander was working a string of sucking kisses down along his belly, giving him a chance to warn her off if he was going to. He wasn't. His arms were nothing but a hot throb of pain and fuck only knew where his head was at but his cock was bang alongside the proceedings like always, filling up with stolen blood under the hot wash of her breath like Pavlov's bloody dog. She made a sweet little noise of approval as he got hard for her, little more than a hum, and wrapped her lips around the head. He grunted something that might've been _yeah_ or might've been _Xan_ but wasn't anywhere in the neighborhood of _stop_ , and she slowly mouthed her way down the length until her nose brushed against his belly. Breathed out. Flexed her hands around his thighs. Started to suck.

The last time they'd done this she'd been... not _bad_ , Spike didn't believe there was such a thing as a bad blowjob, but inexperienced, definitely. He'd never had a hard-on for purity like _some_ demons he could name, but there'd been something about her sweetly curious fumbling that'd hit him straight in the bollocks. Or maybe it had been the honest enthusiasm of the thing, the way she'd set to on his prick like it was the most fun she'd had all year. Either way, he hadn't exactly given her much time to work before he'd hauled her into his lap to finish things off the old-fashioned way.

She'd clearly found some lucky bloke to practice on in the last couple of years, though, because right now she was sucking his brains right out of his sodding skull. " _Fuck,_ yeah," he groaned, and managed to get one hand on the back of her head. Couldn't wrap his fingers in that short, silky hair, couldn't clench his hand in it and _take_ the way he wanted, but he held her steady with his own cool palm on the curve of her skull and rolled his hips up into it, little hitching thrusts. "Just like that, luv, _christ_ that's good."

He hadn't really thought he could come, with all the drugs and shite swimming through his system, but he'd reckoned without the blood-heat of her mouth. The peak took him gentle, low and slow like a wave in the dark, and Xander swallowed it all, lapping kitten-licks at the head as it slipped from her mouth. He watched her swipe the back of her hand unselfconsciously across her smeared mouth and felt a last pulse shiver down his spine and into his softening prick.

She didn't say anything as she pulled his jeans back up, and kept on not saying anything while she tucked him in and did up the fly. Fair enough, really; he wasn't saying anything either. Didn't have the words, even if he had the first bloody idea what he should say. Always did empty his brains along with his bollocks.

"C'mon." Her voice was low, a little husky. "Let's get you to bed."

He allowed her to pull him to his feet, swaying. "You comin' with?"

She gave him a cautious look, uncertain for the first time since she stepped into the hospital room. Like he'd gone off-script, somehow. Fucked if he knew why it'd be a problem _now_ and not when she had his prick in her mouth, but that was Xander for you. Never did make a lick of sense.

"It would be a pain in the ass to find a hotel at this hour," she said, after a moment.

What was it about her that she always had to give herself a sodding out? "You'd make a terrible vampire," he informed her, kicking out of his boots with some effort. "Can't recognize an invitation when it's right in front of your nose."

He ignored whatever complex expression she had twisting up her sulky face and staggered to the unmade bed, hitting the light switch on the way with an uncoordinated elbow. He went straight down onto the mattress, face-down into the pillow in a way that probably would have smothered him if he'd actually needed to breathe, and stayed there. He briefly considered making an effort to get under the blankets and then dismissed it as too much work. Christ, she'd sucked him sodding boneless.

After a moment, her voice came through the dark. "That's not true, you know." There was a pad of little human feet, and then a bit of rustle and thump: one boot, then the other. "I made a great vampire. I was the Master's second and everything."

He freed his face from the pillow enough to mumble, "Chief minion to the most pretentious sod on the continent, right, that's something to aspire to."

She chuckled, low and close, and then the bed bowed under her weight. He wrestled briefly and pointlessly with his pride before giving in to gravity both metaphorical and literal, and rolled. He fetched up against her in the hollow of the mattress, and if pressed, he would insist that the way his nose ended up mashed into the crease of her neck was pure coincidence.

He closed his eyes and inhaled. She smelled like him: leather and cigarettes, blood and come. "Anythin' I can do for you?"

She gave a little snort of amusement and shifted, wrapping her arm around his shoulders. "When you're not five seconds from falling asleep, sure."

"'m awake," he insisted, knowing it was a lie even as it left his mouth. "Can still take your bloody head off."

The hand on his shoulder gave a patronizing little pat. "I'm sure you could, buddy."

"Long as that's clear." _Christ,_ she felt good, all warm and solid against him. He tugged her closer, luxuriating in the heat and meat of her, an animal craving that hadn't been sated by all that booze and blood when he first got back. _Touch, you pillock. You've been at the torture game long enough to know how this works. You've been a real boy again for a month, at least - when's the last time someone touched you that wasn't a fist to the sodding face?_

A hand on Doyle's throat, pressed up against the wall in that stinking alley. A few girls at the club, inviting eyes and brushing fingers that reminded him too much of the Slayerettes to be anything like appealing. Fred, a pat on the shoulder instead of the hug he'd been half-angling for, during that touching goodbye that wasn't. Harmony, just long enough to get his cock in her, and look how well that'd worked out. And before that-

"Stop _thinking,_ " Xander grumbled into his ear. "You're fucking with my beauty sleep."

He grunted a laugh, sliding one of his dead hands up under the hem of her t-shirt. "Can't have that. You need all the help you can get."

"Jerk." She made another one of those low kitten-noises of approval that he was forever going to associate with her warm breath on his prick and squirmed up into his touch, his palm riding the warm sweet curve of her belly. "Big, jerk-faced… vampire."

For all her big talk, she was dropping off faster than him. No wonder. She'd been running herself ragged for the bloody Council, no doubt, so desperate to be useful she'd wear herself down to a nub before she'd let someone give her a hand. Some things never sodding changed.

"Hey. Xander."

"Mmm?"

In for a penny and all that shite. "Why're you here really?"

He wasn't talking about bleedin' Los Angeles and she knew it. "I don't know," she said, finally. Her voice was a rasp of exhaustion, an ache like a bruise, but he thought he could still hear a smile in there somewhere. "When I figure it out, I'll let you know."

###### 

When Spike woke again, he was alone.

He didn't bother patting around in bed like a lady who dropped a pin; the flat was empty of anything but a humming refrigerator and the sheets were chilled. The only sign of life here was him. So to speak.

So much for _I'll let you know._

He rolled over onto his back and threw his arm over his eyes. _What did you expect, wanker? You're in love with her best friend and she's in love with a dead woman - it's not like it's the bleedin' romance of the century. She looked after your pathetic arse, gave you a pity suck that just about blew the top of your head off, and then buggered off into the sunrise. Take a sodding hint._

Be nice if women would stop fucking off in his sleep, though. He was going to get a complex, this kept up.

The tug at the back of his head said it was midmorning or thereabouts, but it wasn't like he had anywhere to go. Beer on the counter, blood in the fridge, smokes in his coat, which was… somewhere. He lifted his head and peered around, spotting it on a hook near the door.

He stared at it for a minute, contemplative. Never his best in the morning, his thoughts were somewhere between _wonder what it says about both of us that she treats it better than I do_ and _was that hook always there?_

Fuck it. Maybe he'd have a beer first.

He'd reckoned without the difficulty inherent in actually _opening_ the sodding thing. Arms didn't hurt so much today and his hands were starting to feel more or less like hands instead of dead slugs strapped to his wrists, but the fine motor skills were still for shit. He wasted a frustrating couple of minutes fruitlessly levering it against the edge of the counter before giving up in disgust and just smashing the sodding thing open in the sink. The jagged neck sliced a little at his lip when he took a swig, and he nursed at the cut idly, thinking about the blood in the fridge and if it was going to be worth the effort to get it out and into the microwave or if he should just give it up as a bad job and go the fuck back to bed.

The scrape of a key in the lock interrupted his musing, and he looked up in shock as the door opened, admitting a stripe of sunlight and a walking pile of grocery bags. The grocery bags cursed in a familiar voice and fumbled at the keys, emerging triumphant with a little "a-hah!" and kicking the door shut with a booted foot.

"Oh hey, you're up," Xander said, apparently heedless of the way he was staring at her like the bloody ghost of Christmas past. "Give me a hand with these?"

That broke through his paralysis, right enough. Spike held up his hands and glared at her, though the effect was sort of lost by her frantic attempts to peer over the top of the grocery bags. "Really, pet?"

"Oh, whatever." She navigated around the end of the couch - though it looked like a close call for a moment - and dumped her haul on the counter with a relieved grunt. "I come bearing - _christ_ that's heavy - bearing gifts, the least you can do is say 'thank you.'"

"Yeah, yeah, ta ever so." He surveyed the pile of bags. All heaped up like that, he was actually a little impressed she'd gotten it all inside with her scrawny little human arms. "What've you got in here, anyway?"

"The usual. Candy, ice cream, coupla frozen pizzas. More beer." She started unloading her bounty onto the counter. "Not to mention assorted salty snacks and things to dip them in. And if you could avoid a repeat of the Queso Incident of '01, I would take it as a _personal_ favor."

"No promises. _Ugh,_ Xan, really?" He cantilevered a bag of crisps out of the bag between his wrists and held it aloft for her inspection. "Sour cream and onion? What am I, some kind of animal?"

"Excuse you, those are for _me_." She snatched them out of his grip, such as it was, her nose held firmly in the air. "The whole world doesn't revolve around you, you know."

But Spike was already pawing through the remaining bags, looking for any other such insults to culinary good taste. He turned up the usual Xander Harris specials, heavy on the chocolate and artificial flavoring, but also a couple boxes of Weetabix - aw, she remembered - and a six pack of the fancy import stuff he used to nick from Rupert's fridge. She didn't get _those_ at the corner shop, that's for bloody sure, and he surveyed the pile again, this time with an eye for the labels. Did she go on some sort of sodding _spree_?

A familiar geeky logo caught his eye, and he fished out a plastic baggie from the bottom of the stack. He hooked it over his thumb and held it aloft. "This for you too, pet?"

She made a grab for the games, but he danced backwards, just out of her reach. "Ah ah ah!" he scolded, grinning lazily. "Buyin' games on the corporate card? Tsk, tsk. What would Rupert say?"

"Probably relieved to know I wasn't actually body-snatched, after the visit to the import shop," she said, and made another grab for it, no more successful than the last. "Spike, c'mon."

"What'd you even get, anyway? Thought you were some kind of itinerant wanderer these days, going where the wind takes you and all that rot. Shouldn't you be travelin' light?"

"Yeah, but _you're_ not. Theoretically," she added, with a dubious look around his flat. Fair enough, it was a bit sparse still, he was man enough to admit. Hadn't had the time or inclination to feather the nest just yet, with visions and mad Slayers and such. "And I thought it might be time for you to stop tusslin' with the Kong and move into the twenty-first century."

He resisted the urge to clutch the bag defensively to his chest. There was _nothing_ wrong with bloody Donkey Kong, fuck's sake. Kids these days just didn't know how to appreciate the classics. "Gonna teach me one of your war games, is that it, pet?"

She finally managed to snatch the bag away on her third try, a blush burning high on her cheeks. "Gotta pass the time somehow, right? And I figured it's probably good for your hands. Like physical therapy, or- whatever. The doctors said you should try to use them as much as possible until the neural pathways stabilize."

Docs hadn't said anything of the sort to _him,_ but then, she'd been the one to spring him, hadn't she? Maybe she got the lecture when she was fetching his stuff from the nurses. They probably thought she'd be looking after him, since she was giving him a ride home. Didn't realize she wouldn't be sticking around long enough to-

Wait a sodding moment.

Spike looked again at the absurd pile of food: all of his favorite snacks, yeah, but all of _hers_ , too. And the beer, and the games, neither of which are the sort of thing to take on a long-haul flight back to Europe. If fact, if he didn't know better, he might think she was making herself right at home.

"You know, I don't recall asking for a housemate."

The way she abruptly cut her eyes to the side was all the answer he needed, even before she puffed up with bluster. "I didn't ask for one _either,_ all those times you got dumped on my doorstep, but did I shove you out into the sun? No I did not. Time to pay the piper, buddy."

Spike didn't even bother to tamp down on his wolfish smile. Well, then. _That_ was a bloody turn-up for the books. "If you insist. S'pose I could make room."

Xander looked at him sidelong, pinking up a bit along the cheeks. "It's really the least you could do."

"'s true. In fact, as _I_ recall matters, I still owe you one." He held up his hands, wiggled the fingers pointedly. "Technically, I owe you two."

"Yeah?" She set down the bag and turned back to him, her answering grin blooming back in full force. "You think your hands are up to it, pal?"

Spike played out his tongue over his lower lip and eyed her up and down with every bit of obnoxious interest he could muster. "Tell you what, luv. You leave the housekeeping for later, and we'll see what arrangements we can make."

Xander leaned past him, opened the freezer door, and shoved the ice cream inside, all without breaking eye contact. "You Brits don't mind warm beer, right?"

Growling low in his throat, Spike surged forward and scooped her up. She went laughing, her thighs warm around his hips, and he wasted no time burying his face in the curve of her throat. _Christ,_ she smelled good. Like blood and sunshine.

"Door. Spike- Spike, door!"

"Give me _some_ credit, luv," Spike said, navigating around the doorway into the bedroom. She hit the mattress with a bounce and _sprawled,_ long limbs akimbo, her eyes bright with laughter. Spike wasted no time crawling in between those muscled thighs and making himself at home, sucking a bruise at the join of her neck. "You still figurin' things out, then?"

Xander didn't pretend to misunderstand, just leaned up and nipped a kiss to his earlobe. "Maybe I just wanted a goddamn vacation."

"You ever had one of those before?"

"They say it's good to try new things." She fisted a hand in his collar and dragged his mouth up to hers, pushy as you please. Had herself a nice little taste before he felt the corner of her mouth curve up in a smirk. "How about it, pal? You gonna broaden my horizons?"

It was a very Xander kind of answer, a lot of words to say shite-all, but Spike knew what she meant right enough. Wouldn't be the first time he'd been a port in a storm, now would it? Given the givens he would've thought it'd be a bitter pill to swallow, finding himself right back where he started, but with a handsome woman grinning up at him like a challenge flag he found he didn't much mind. Maybe he'd grown as a person - hah, chance'd be a fine thing - or maybe it was because Xander had been in his shoes a time or two herself, and was only ever unkind on purpose. Or maybe it was just because he didn't love her, and didn't ache with wanting more.

Either way, as he propped himself up on his elbows and finally got his hands into that short, silky hair, Spike found himself with a strange sort of tenderness suffusing his chest. Not the bright flame he'd felt for Buffy or Dru, but warm enough for all of that. She'd taken care of him last night, after all; the least he could do was return the favor. He might not be able to do much to fix whatever was going on inside of her stubborn little head - if he'd learned anything about women, he'd learned _that_ much, right enough - but this, he knew how to do. Whatever troubles had brought her here, whatever little vacation she was taking from her real life down here in his dingy little flat, the very least he could do was make sure she had a damn fine trip.

"Among other things," Spike promised, and set about paying his debts the only way he knew how.

**Author's Note:**

> "I mean, give me some 'eye of the beholder' jokes. You know? Or, uh, some 'eye for an eye' jokes. Or maybe even a post-modern 'I, Claudius' joke, y'know? It's about standards, Dawnie."
> 
> I kinda can't believe I actually finished this; I've been working on it off and on for almost two years now, ever since I went through my last nostalgia-binge rewatch and found myself considerably less enamored with Joss Whedon's self-insert nice-guy-isms. I still liked the _core_ of who Xander's character was supposed to be, I just think the show in general would have been better without the need to pit their Nineties Girl Power against a Token Guy Friend, and I think Xander in general would have been better as a quippy bi girl self-medicating her trauma with sarcasm. So... *gestures vaguely* Plus, it gave me a chance to revisit one of my oldest and most cherished OTPs as an adult, which was a fun and fascinating enterprise.
> 
> I'm [sorrelchestnut](https://sorrelchestnut.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, come say hi!


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